https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io/uap-disclosure-act-pentagon-rewrite-nov-2023/

The UAP Disclosure Act: The proposed Pentagon/AARO re-write of November 2023

DOUGLAS DEAN JOHNSON

Jul 24, 2024

The top of the first page of a document submitted by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security to congressional negotiators on the UAP Disclosure Act, November 2023.

By Douglas Dean Johnson

@ddeanjohnson on X/Twitter

My gmail address is my full name

Original publication: July 24, 2024, 10:00 AM EDT. Any substantive revisions to the original article will be noted in a log found at the end of the article. Those reading this article in the e-mailed version may have to click on "view in browser" under my byline in order to access embedded documents such as PDF files.

In the light of recent statements by the former head of the Pentagon "UFO office," Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, asserting that the Pentagon/AARO successfully derailed the Schumer-Rounds Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act (UAPDA) in late 2023, I am releasing here a proposed 33-page line-by-line rewrite of the Senate-passed UAPDA that the Pentagon provided to congressional negotiators during end-stage negotiations in November 2023.

This is the first publication of this document anywhere.

Further down in this article, you'll find Kirkpatrick's answers to questions I addressed to him for this article, such as whether the National Security Advisor or any other higher authority ever tried to subdue his activity in opposition to the UAPDA, and why the proposed Pentagon re-write of the UAPDA would have retained provisions affirming the right of the federal government to take ownership (via the exercise of eminent domain) over "any and all recovered technologies of unknown origin and biological evidence of non-human intelligence that be be controlled by private persons or entities..."

Pentagon Nov 2023 proposed revisions to UAPDA

GUIDE TO INTERPRETATION OF THE DOCUMENT: In the embedded PDF document, the unmodified underlying text is the Senate-passed UAPDA. Strike-out marking through a paragraph or phrase indicates that the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security ((OUSD(I&S)) wanted that language removed from the bill. All underlined words and phrases were OUSD(I&S) proposals for new language or replacement language to be inserted.

Thus, if the OUSD(I&S) text had been enacted in total (which is not exactly what occurred), the resulting law would have been the original text, plus the underlined additions, minus the extensive strikeouts. This type of legislative re-write document is sometimes called a "red line."

The nature of the document is explained in introductory paragraphs found on the top third of the first page, shown in the image above: It was presented as the "informal views" of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, which stated that the Department of Defense "strongly urges consideration" of the proposed extensive rewriting of Division G of S. 2226, which was the Schumer-Rounds UAP Disclosure Act, part of the the FY 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that had been passed by the U.S. Senate on July 27, 2023. The introduction to the document says that the Department of Defense position was arrived at "after conferring with NARA/ISOO," referring respectively to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and to the Information Security Oversight Office.

The Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security is the top intelligence officer in the Department of Defense. [1] The Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the "UFO office," is attached to the OUSD(I&S) for administrative matters, although starting in 2023 the AARO director reports directly to a higher official, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, "on all operational and security matters." The Deputy Secretary, Kathleen Hicks, ranks directly under the Secretary of Defense.

Kirkpatrick served as AARO director from its formal inception in mid-2022 until December 1, 2023, which included the period that the 2023 UAPDA language was under consideration in Congress (mid-July to early December 2023).

Data associated with the original "informal views" file document (which I have sanitized) suggests that it was transmitted to negotiators on Capitol Hill in late November, 2023, during the final stages of negotiations over what UAP language would survive in the final FY 2024 NDAA. The final FY 2024 NDAA language became public on December 6, 2003, passed the Senate on December 13, passed the House of Representatives on December 14, and was signed into law on December 22, 2023 (Public Law 118-31).

Notwithstanding the designation of the OUSD((I&S) document as reflecting "informal" views, the Department's advice was conveyed emphatically ("strongly urges consideration") and in granular detail. The 33-page document proposed an extensive rewrite of the Schumer-Rounds proposal, removing most of the central elements of the Senate-approved language. Moreover, the Department's advice was largely heeded: The final enacted language reflected the Department's basic viewpoint on major points, although not on every detail.

In a 70-minute interview conducted by Marik von Rennenkampff on July 17, 2024 (viewable on YouTube here; rough transcript posted here), Kirkpatrick spoke openly about the Pentagon's 2023 opposition to the UAPDA– the first time that he has addressed that subject in detail in public, as far as I am aware. In this interview, Kirkpatrick presented opposition by the Department of Defense and AARO to the 2023 UAPDA as decisive, telling von Rennenkampff, "We convinced Congress last year not to go down that road..." [italics added for emphasis]

[Under End Note No. 2 below, I have posted an eight-minute clip from the 70-minute interview. I encourage interested readers to use the links above to review the entire 70-minute exchange, which included discussion of well-known IR videos taken by Navy pilots, and also Kirkpatrick's remarks about a recent report issued by AARO regarding analysis of a metallic sample, in addition to the extended discussion of the UAP Disclosure Act.]

The OUSD(I&S) document that I am posting here today does not spell out AARO's substantive objections to the UAPDA, as Kirkpatrick did in the July 17 interview, but it essentially incorporates those objections through its extensive proposed revisions to the UAPDA, which the Senate had already approved. In an email exchange on July 23, 2024, Kirkpatrick said he could not confirm (but neither did he dispute) the authenticity of the OUSD(I&S) document, adding, "However, the document does represent many of the objections I tried to articulate to Marik [von Rennenkampff, in the July 17, 2024 interview]."

THE BIRTH AND DEMISE OF THE ORIGINAL UAP DISCLOSURE ACT

The UAPDA was originally unveiled, with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) as prime sponsor and Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD) as lead co-sponsor, on July 14, 2023. Four other senators co-sponsored the measure. After some modifications, it was added to the FY 2024 NDAA as part of a list of agreed-on amendments, without floor debate or a separate vote. The Senate passed its FY 2024 NDAA, including the UAPDA, on July 27, 2023.

As passed by the Senate, the UAPDA would have created a President-nominated, Senate-confirmed UAP Records Review Board– a temporary federal agency with full-time professional staff and broad investigatory powers to search out, gather, and release any UAP-related material from throughout the government, with the President making final decisions regarding delay or release of material deemed especially sensitive. The bill was modeled in most respects on the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Collection Act.

However, in conference committee with the House of Representatives, the UAPDA was greatly stripped down. The proposed independent review board was eliminated, as was most of the original language that had been widely read to imply that somewhere within the government's purview tangible evidence of nonhuman visitation was likely to be found. The final FY 2024 NDAA enacted on December 22, 2023 merely conferred on the National Archives and Records Administration a somewhat beefed-up mission to gather UAP-related documentation into a collection, but affording far more authority for agencies to shield material from public disclosure, especially during the first 25 years after creation of a document.

[For a more detailed description of the final enacted language, I refer the reader to my article "Quick guide to UAP-related provisions in the final FY 2024 National Defense Authorization Act" (December 13, 2023).]

Throughout the period of July-December 2023, I reported extensively on the progress of the UAPDA, a measure that I supported. At the time, and since, I have repeatedly stated that the gutting of the bill was due not to any lobbying campaign by powerful defense contractors, as some imagined, but to opposition from the Pentagon/AARO, the objections of which were largely adopted by several of the very senior Republican lawmakers who were among the small group of lawmakers who resolved the final contentious issues on NDAA. [3]

The Pentagon's opposition to the Senate-passed UAPDA was far from a state secret even in late 2023. After the stripped-down final version emerged from behind closed doors in early December, even the New York Times reported that a "person familiar with the talks who insisted on anonymity to describe them noted that the Defense Department also had pushed back forcefully on wider measures." ("Congress Orders U.F.O. Records Released but Drops Bid for Broader Disclosure," by Kayla Guo, New York Times, December 14, 2023)

THE PENTAGON AND THE WHITE HOUSE

From the time that the UAPDA was unveiled on July 14, 2023, up until the issuance of the final NDAA conference report on December 6, 2023, certain social-media influencers claimed that the UAPDA had the backing of President Biden and his National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan. At no point did I encounter any actual evidence of such interest or support by high-level decisionmakers in the Executive Branch, and as months passed after the Senate's July 27 passage of the NDAA/UAPDA, it became quite clear that the Biden Administration was not doing anything to help enact the UAPDA.

I asked Kirkpatrick, "When you were the director of AARO, did you ever receive direction or heavy guidance from anybody in the White House, or the Executive Office of the President, or the National Security Council, or any other higher authority, indicating that you should soften or qualify your opposition to the UAPDA?"

Kirkpatrick replied:

The White House could have cared less about this issue. No one from the White House, EOP [Executive Office of the President], NSC [National Security Council], or any other 'higher authority' called me or my boss to put pressure on me to soften my position on the UAPDA. No one in Congress did either. (email, July 23, 2024)

As I was the first to report (on July 13, 2024), Senator Rounds re-introduced the UAPDA on July 11, 2024, as a possible amendment (SA 2610) to the FY 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (S. 4638), which the Senate will take up later this year. As filed by Rounds on July 11, Senate Majority Leader Schumer was listed as co-sponsor (no longer the prime or controlling sponsor).

Marik von Rennenkampff led off his July 17 interview with Kirkpatrick by noting that reintroduction of the UAPDA, to which Kirkpatrick responded: "Last year we convinced Congress last year not to go down that road..." Von Rennenkampff soon followed up: "Did you say that you or AARO pushed back on the Schumer-Rounds amendment when it was proposed last year? That seems to be a big mystery as to how it was, shall we say, watered down? Other people say 'gutted.'"

Kirkpatrick answered:

So let's be clear about how the process works in the United States government. Every year the NDAA is put together by proposals from both the Senate and the House side. Okay? Those proposals are socialized with the Department. The Department then gets an opportunity to write a reclaima [request for reconsideration] that goes back to the Hill that says, "Hey, this is not a good idea for these reasons," or, "This would be better if it was written this way," or, "Yeah, we just can't really support this because of these resource constraints," or whatever the case may be. And that is true for every piece of the NDAA– it gets farmed back to us and we or the Department get to look at that.

As AARO, the pieces of legislation that were written about AARO come to us, and we are allowed to write our thoughts and disclaimers. And so we wrote exactly that. "Look, this is duplicative of language you gave us in '22 [the NDAA enacted in December 2022, which mandated a "historical report" to be produced by AARO]. Let us finish the thing that you told us to do the first time, before you write additional legislation."

In the von Rennenkampff interview, Kirkpatrick stressed his view that creation of a UAP Records Review Board would duplicate a mission already assigned to AARO. But he also maintained that there was no evidence that would justify creation of a new agency to hunt for inter-government knowledge or possession of nonhuman technology.

Kirkpatrick said:

I mean, look, let me be clear: We found no evidence of any of these allegations. None. And I had access to everything there was to have access to. I went up and briefed and testified [to members of Congress] just as recently as a couple of months ago, with the SAPCO director and the CAPCO director from ODNI [officials who oversee special access programs], and all of us have gone through everything that we have, everything that witnesses have come forward and said, "Hey, this is this hidden program." And it turns out none of them are those hidden programs. None of them. All of them have turned out to be other things that have nothing to do with extraterrestrial reverse engineering. And all of them have been reported to Congress....

And [in the UAPDA] they're telling the commercial industry they have to turn over all of this stuff. Well, the commercial industry – and I talked to all of the commercial industry, and they're scratching their heads and they don't know what they're talking about [in the bill language].

The November 2023 OUSD(I&S) "informal views" draft was not adopted by the House-Senate conferees in total. But the final enacted language appears to have been largely consistent with OUSD(I&S)/AARO's core objectives. The proposed independent review board, with its professional staff and broad powers, was deleted. The final law, like the OUSD(I&S)/AARO draft, gives Executive Branch agencies broad discretion to prevent disclosure of specific records, although the enacted version contains a limited presumption for disclosure 25 years after creation of a UAP-related document.

PENTAGON'S PROPOSED 2023 UAPDA REWRITE RETAINED AN EMINENT DOMAIN PROVISION

One noteworthy aspect of the OUSD(I&S) draft is the way it proposed to rewrite Section 9010, "Disclosure of Recovered Technologies of Unknown Origin and Biological Evidence of Non-human Intelligence." In the Senate-passed UAPDA, this section empowered the Review Board to exercise eminent domain (i.e., assert government ownership) "over any and all recovered technologies of unknown origin and biological evidence of non-human intelligence that may be controlled by private persons or entities..."

The OUSD(I&S) draft proposed substantial weakening of the provision by replacing mandatory language ("The Federal Government shall exercise eminent domain over...) with non-binding hortatory language ("It is the sense of Congress that the Federal Government should exercise eminent domain appropriately over...)– but OUSD(I&S)/AARO did not propose deleting the objects to which such eminent domain "should" apply: "any and all recovered technologies of unknown origin and biological evidence of non-human intelligence that may be controlled by private persons or entities..."

Moreover, other OUSD(I&S) revisions would have required that any such exotic material be made available to AARO (rather than to an independent review board), and would have assigned to the President (rather than a review board) certain determinations regarding such material.

By email, I asked Sean Kirkpatrick, "What was the rationale for recommending retention of proposed new provisions of law that would have provided something of a legal foundation for AARO or other federal entities to assert control over hypothetical technologies of unknown origin or hypothetical evidence of non-human intelligence (at least, apparently, in such cases in which the President deemed it appropriate)? Was this a 'just in case' provision?"

Kirkpatrick replied:

At the time, the conspiracy frenzy was pushing this narrative of some prime contractor having this material, and there were these lingering allegations of AARO not having authorities, despite it being written into law previously. So a compromise was proposed to allow for the exercising of eminent domain under AARO’s authority to underscore that AARO could compel disclosure of anything, should anything exist. Since we know nothing exists, we didn’t feel it made our job harder, and felt this could close a gap in uninformed allegations. (email, July 23, 2024)

In the final enacted bill, however, the eminent domain section was entire absent. [4]

END NOTES

[1] In 2023 the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security was Ronald Moultrie, who resigned effective February 29, 2024. President Biden has nominated as his successor Tonya Wilkerson, who is currently Deputy Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). Wilkerson's nomination is currently pending before the Senate Armed Services Committee. For further information on that matter, see my article "Who is Tonya P. Wilkerson, and what does it have to do with UFOs?," May 21, 2024.

[2] I have embedded here a nine-minute excerpt from the 70-minute interview of Sean Kirkpatrick, conducted on July 17, 2024, by Marik von Rennenkampff. This clip runs from about the 8-minute point to about the 17-minute point in the original video.

Excerpt from July 17, 2024 interview of Sean Kirkpatrick by Marik von Rennenkampff, discussing AARO's 2023 activity in opposition to the original Schumer-Rounds UAP Disclosure Act. Fair Use under 17 U.S. Code § 107 for noncommercial purposes of investigative journalism, scientific research and debate, education, and commentary.

[3] In an exchange with Senator Rounds on the Senate floor on December 13, 2023, Senator Schumer said, "It is really an outrage that the House didn’t work with us on adopting our proposal for a review board, which, by definition, needs bipartisan consent. Now it means that declassification of UAP records will be largely up to the same entities that blocked and obfuscated their disclosure for decades." However, Schumer said nothing on that occasion (or any other occasion of which I am aware) to indicate that he viewed the opposition to the UAPDA as originating in whole or part from corporate entities. Rather, he expressed criticism of unspecified actors within the Executive Branch: "The U.S. Government has gathered a great deal of information about UAPs over many decades but has refused to share it with the American people. That is wrong, and, additionally, it breeds mistrust. We have also been notified by multiple credible sources that information on UAPs has also been withheld from Congress, which, if true, is a violation of the laws requiring full notification to the legislative branch, especially as it relates to the four congressional leaders, Defense Committees, and the Intelligence Committee."

An exchange on the U.S. Senate floor between the prime sponsor of the 2023 UAP Disclosure Act, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and the lead co-sponsor, Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD). This colloquy occurred on December 13, 2023, after the UAP Disclosure Act had been gutted in a House-Senate conference committee, and the Senate had passed the final FY 2024 NDAA.

[4] All of the UAP-related language that was included in the final Fiscal Year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, enacted December 22, 2023 (Public Law 118-31), is included in the PDF file embedded below. The UAP Records Collection provision, which is what survived 

of the original UAP Disclosure Act, appears on pages 568-575. Additional explanation is found in my December 13, 2023 article, "Quick guide to UAP-related provisions in the final FY 2024 National Defense Authorization Act."

UAP pages only (final) from NDAA (HR 2670) and Joint Explanatory Statement 12-6-23

https://thedebrief.org/open-science-and-unidentified-aerial-phenomena/

Open Science and Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

Avi Loeb·October 6, 2022

If the U.S. government finds evidence that unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) have an extraterrestrial technological origin, the President will likely be the first to know about it.

However, such an event will be no different from the President being the first to know that hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe.

It makes little sense for scientific knowledge of reality to adhere to national borders. Science should be done in an open and transparent way, so that all of humanity will benefit from it. In the case of COVID-19, many lives would have been saved if the detailed scientific information about the outbreak in Wuhan, China, had been immediately shared worldwide.

Yesterday, I posted a paper with a quantitative scientific calculation, implying that the dark objects identified as “phantoms” by a team of Ukrainian astronomers led by Boris Zhilayev are likely artillery shells. The objects were characterized by the astronomers as having sizes of 3–12 meters and speeds of up to 15 kilometers per second at a distance of up to 10–12 kilometers. I showed that these characteristics would result in huge fireballs around the objects as a result of their unavoidable friction with the air. The power of the fireball scales as the inferred distance to the fifth power. If the distances are overestimated by a factor of ten, the size and speed of the dark objects would match those of artillery shells.

Reporter Matthew Gault from VICE sent me Boris Zhilayev’s response, which read, “Avi Loeb is a theorist. We are experimenters. We observe, process, and determine the characteristics of objects. Our publication contains just such data. We are not in the business of interpretation. Avi Loeb is trying to interpret our data. The work contains a discovery. Bright and dark objects. Our work can be repeated and verified. Although this is a challenging experiment. Our characteristics of the objects are very similar to those of US military pilots and Canadian civilian pilots.”

I wrote back to Matthew the following:

“Being an experimentalist or a theorist is not relevant. All scientists, whether they are experimentalists or theorists, must use logic.  Here is how my argument cannot be refuted by anyone who uses logic. The Ukrainian astronomers saw the phantom objects as dark. This means that the objects blocked the background light from the sky. The required electromagnetic interaction with light implies that the phantom objects must also interact with air molecules. There is no logical way for the phantom objects to block light but not air molecules because the cross-section for electromagnetic interaction of air molecules with matter is larger than for light with matter. If we accept this premise, then the parameters inferred by the experimentalists would create fireballs of several terra-Watt brightness that illuminate the sky. This is comparable to the entire electric power consumption on Earth coming from one of these objects. But the experimentalists claim the object are darker than the sky. This violates logic and means that the distances of the phantom objects were overestimated by a factor of ten, as I show in my paper.”

Immediately afterward, I received an email from UAP debunker Mick West. He argued that the dark objects cited in the Ukrainian study are most likely insects because they change their speed in the sky, unlike artillery shells. Consider, for example, Figure 13 from the Zhilayev et al. paper. It shows snapshots of a dark object at three times separated by a constant interval of 0.02 seconds. Mick argued that the separation between the top and middle positions in the sky is larger than between the middle and bottom positions. Hence the object must change its speed very rapidly, unlike artillery shells.

I explained to Mick that this data is fully consistent with an object moving at a constant speed. Imagine filming an artillery shell that is approaching or receding from us at a nearly

constant speed. The angle on the sky that is traversed by the object per unit time will be inversely proportional to distance. At a larger distance the object will traverse a small angle per time period and at a closer distance it will traverse a large angle for the same period. We see this phenomenon routinely when a train approaches us from a distance and most much more rapidly across our field of view when it passes by.  The object should also get bigger when approaching us, but the observed angular size of the dark object in the images may be blurred by resolution, atmospheric turbulence or its motion.

When caught in the crossfire between two sides, it is often said that one should simply duck down and let the bullets cross and reach both sides. This is a wise strategy… unless science provides a bulletproof shield.

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s – Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011-2020). He chairs the advisory board for the Breakthrough Starshot project, and is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors onScience and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021.

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/firing-line/video/bill-nelson-zxvvz4/?fbclid=IwAR2iZO-vadZvUiQKqX6ra1cvqHnd5-qnqYX7IdPITwEoRkkbtZQxGyDrInI

Bill Nelson

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson discusses America’s mission to return to the moon and reach Mars, a new international space race, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) sightings, and NASA’s search for intelligent life in the universe.

The final frontier, this week on ‘Firing Line.’
America has always had a frontier.
Now that frontier is upward, and it’s out into the cosmos.

A child of the Florida space coast who became the second sitting member of Congress in orbit.

We have liftoff.

Now Bill Nelson’s been asked to lead NASA into the future.
The agenda is ambitious and expensive — put an American back on the Moon by 2024, then on to Mars.

Mars is the goal in the decade of the 2030s.

There’s competition from China and Russia and the space race among billionaires to be the first.

Liftoff as the Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon…
There’s also a brand-new government report about unexplained sightings in the sky.

Look at that thing, dude.

And it may have raised more questions than answers.

Look at it fly!

What does NASA Administrator Bill Nelson say now?

‘Firing Line with Margaret Hoover’ is made possible in part by… And by… Corporate funding is provided by…
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, welcome to ‘Firing Line.’

Thank you so much.
I love to talk about space.

You have said that NASA is in your blood.
You grew up on the Space Coast and became the second sitting member of Congress to travel into space aboard the Space Shuttle in 1986.
But a decade ago, NASA seemed adrift in space.
The space shuttle program was ending, and the U.S. had no means of reaching space.
Compared to 10 years ago, Senator, where does NASA stand today?

Well, it was specifically 11 years ago that Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and I wrote the bill that put NASA on the course that it’s on, a dual course — one-course commercial companies that NASA would hire, specifically the delivery of crew and cargo to the International Space Station.
And then the other course, NASA, to get out of low Earth orbit and go explore the heavens.
And that’s the course that we’re on.
Now, in that period of time, the space shuttle was coming to an end after the destruction of It was strongly encouraged to shut it down and come up with a design that was more safe for human life.
And that’s what we have now.
And you will see that in the largest rocket ever will launch at the end of this year.
The space launch system with its spacecraft, Orion, on the top.

I’d like to ask you about the SLS space launch system, which is NASA’s enormous launch rocket, a project that you have supported going back to 2011 when you were in the United States Senate.
Let me ask you, the office of inspector general says that that project is costing billions more than it was supposed to and is at least two years behind schedule.
As NASA administrator, your job now is to keep the project on schedule and within budget.
How are you going to do that?

And more recently, it’s just been delayed further because of a protest of the bid that NASA earlier this year had awarded to a competition of the lander, a commercial lander.
So that’s another delay of 100 days and then on the basis of what the General Accounting Office decides.
So you have these delays.
But the fact is, once GAO decides, we’re ready to go, and we’re going to push full steam ahead.

The goal was to launch Artemis in 2021, and then.
ultimately, land astronauts on the Moon by the end of 2024.
So is that going to stay on schedule, or will that be delayed?

We’re going with crew in 2023, and then, depending on this competition for a lander in the commercial sector, then that’s going to determine when we actually land on the moon with humans.
And that’s what we’ve got to keep on track and we’ve got to try to speed up.

You said you’re ready to go as soon as the GAO, the Government Accountability Office, says so, but in May, they said, quote, ‘The ambitious schedule decreases the likelihood of NASA achieving its goal.’
So what gives?
Who’s right here?

Well, that report was actually written on materials and information that they had received earlier that have since been changed.
However, space is hard, space is risky.
And when you have human life in it, it’s important that you do it right.
The entire space program all the way back from Project Mercury, look at all the delays there, after the Apollo 1 fire that we lost three astronauts.
They had to redesign the spacecraft.
You’ve seen these delays as a result because space is hard.

How confident are you there will be a woman on the Moon in 2024?

Well, don’t hold to that.
I’ve said space is hard.
That’s the goal.
So whenever that is, it will be the first woman and the next man.
And in the course of all the landings will also be the first person of color.

So there’s a chance it will be delayed from 2024.

We’ll see.
That’s the goal.

Listen, in 1968, astronauts on the first manned mission to the Moon, the Apollo 8, sent back a photograph of the Earth, which gave us a new perspective on our planet, and it even helped propel the environmental movement towards the first Earth Day in 1970.
One of your first interviews, you mentioned that climate change would be a top issue for you as the NASA administrator.
How will NASA’s new Earth System Observatory help protect the planet?

It’s five missions over the next decade, yet once on orbit, it’s all going to talk to each other as they measure every detail about land, the seas, ice, and the atmosphere.
And that is going to give us a three-dimensional picture of the Earth’s environment and what are the changes and what we project in the future.
That is already, in the scientific community, is just being greeted with extraordinary excitement.
Because if you want to mitigate climate, you’ve got to measure it.
And that’s what NASA is going to do.

The Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, which cost a relatively inexpensive $85 million to build and operate, just went on its ninth flight.
It was about 1/200th of what the SLS rocket, which hasn’t flown yet, has cost so far.
Ingenuity has been so successful that NASA extended its mission for at least another 30 days.
Should NASA focus even more on smaller missions like this that it’s so good at?

Well, Ingenuity is the result of a very large mission and a very successful one.
We have been putting landers out on Mars since the 1970s.
And so the one that is there now is the size of a Volkswagen, the rover.
And so they got this idea of attaching this little helicopter to it just to see if a helicopter could fly in an atmosphere that is one percent of the density of Earth’s atmosphere.
And lo and behold, it worked.
And then they said, ‘Well, it’s working so well, let’s try to do some other things.’
And now, after nine times flying, what it is actually, it’s a scout for the rover.
So we now have a scout on Mars.

It’s extraordinary to watch.
You know, William F. Buckley Jr.
spoke to astronaut Alan Shepard in 1973, two years after Shepard walked on the Moon, in a program that was entitled ‘Was It Worth It?’
Watch this.

I think we have the first amount of data back from the lunar surface that’s going to tell us a tremendous amount of the geology of the Moon, its relationship to the geology of the Earth, how the two are related, how we can better determine what’s going on on the Earth.
These are the kinds of things that we have to assess in the next five or six years.
Now, I can’t honestly say what’s going to be the answer five or six years from now — do we, in fact, want to go back to the Moon again?
Perhaps the answer will be no.
Perhaps we don’t want to go back for 100 years.
If you say, ‘All right, in 1985, automatically, fund $3 billion annually for the second expedition to the Moon,’ I would say I couldn’t give you an honest answer.
If you had to force me to make a decision now, I would say no, let’s wait five years.

And would that reasoning apply to Mars?

Oh, I think so, yeah.

Why is now the time to return to the Moon and to go to Mars?

Because in going back to the Moon, we’re going to learn how to go to Mars.
Now, as a practical matter, we’re not going to be there until late in the decade in the 2030s, so as we get prepared to go to Mars, first of all, how long is it going to take you?
It’s going to take you 8 to 10 months to get there.
Once you get there, you’re going to have to stay a minimum of a year because the planets have to come back into realignment where it’s closest so that you can get back to Earth.
So we’re going to learn habitats and protection and systems and new technology on the Moon that will enable us to go to Mars and to stay as long as a year in order to be able to get back to Earth.

A year ago, the Pentagon officially released three videos that were already circulating online.
The videos were from 2004 and 2015, and they showed unidentified objects on radar, performing in uncharacteristic ways.

My gosh.
They’re all going against the wind.
The wind’s 120 knots west.
Look at that thing, dude.

The director of National Intelligence has just declassified a nine-page report that is a preliminary assessment of UAPs, unexplained aerial phenomenon, what we all used to call UFOs.
Of the 144 UAP reports between 2004 and 2021, only one was identified in high confidence.
The other 143 are still mysterious.
What did you think of the key findings of that report?

Well, I’ve read that report, and two years ago, in a classified setting in the Senate Armed Services Committee, I talked to the pilots, and they are absolutely convinced that they saw something.
They locked their radar onto it, they followed it, and then, all of a sudden, it would move.
And it had no exhaust.
It had no plume.
It had no visible wings or any kind of engines.
So we don’t know what it is.
But it’s something because, as you mentioned, over 140 sightings and maybe a couple of dozen that are really very specific sightings by very credible sources.
And so, what is it?
We don’t know.
NASA has a program searching for life in the universe.
It’s called Space Astrobiology.
We’re looking for signs of life on Mars.
We’re looking in the project that’s going to Venus now to see is there life in that atmosphere.
We also listen in the universe.
We have a grant program for people listening in the universe for any kind of intelligent signal.
So we don’t know what this phenomenon is, but we sure need to find out.

According to the report, more, quote, ‘scientific knowledge’ may be needed to understand some of the objects.
The report reads, quote… Senator, they’re saying that our science is not good enough to understand the phenomena that was observed.
I know you say we don’t know what it is, but what do you think it is?

Well, I don’t know.
I hope it’s not an adversary here on Earth, because then they have technology, if that’s the case, that we do not have.
But the answer to your question is, I do not know.

Do you believe there’s life in another part of the universe?

I sure do.
And let me tell you why.
The universe is 13.5 billion years old.
We’re even finding now other suns that very likely have planets, that we call exoplanets, circulating around, and we’re looking for signs of one with a habitable atmosphere that would duplicate what we have in our solar system with planet Earth.
And so do I think in a universe that is so big that there is another sun in another galaxy, that that sun has planets revolving around it?
You bet I believe that.
And very likely, if there is, the chemical composition, as all those gases amassed around and formed the planets, the chemical composition could produce life.
And that’s what we’re exploring.

Does NASA have a plan, Senator, for what it would do should a UAP turn out to be a space alien?

No, but the first thing we’d want to do is to find out if it’s friend or foe.
But, you know, we’re not to that point because we just don’t know what this phenomenon is.
I think with all those sightings that you referenced, there’s something there.
This is not an optical illusion or a radar blip that’s a mistake.
When you talk to those Navy pilots, they’re convinced because they saw it, and they tracked it.

Senator, of course, one of the possibilities is that this is a foreign adversary’s advanced technology or perhaps our own advanced technology that is highly classified.
What is the probability that that’s what this is?

Well, I hope it’s ours that is highly secret, because this kind of propulsion that has no wings and doesn’t have an exhaust and suddenly darts from here to there in an instant, covering a distance at speeds that are incredible, I hope it’s ours.
But according to our government, they’re telling us it is not.

Well, then you can understand the curiosity that we’re out looking for other life, we believe it’s there, we have unidentified objects flying in our own airspace, but we don’t have a plan for aliens?

Well, I had a wonderful plan when I watched Steven Spielberg’s ‘E.T.,’ and he was a friendly little fella.
But we just don’t know.
We don’t know what this phenomenon is.

All right.
Richard Branson is scheduled to join Virgin Galactic, a space test next week.
Jeff Bezos plans to be on board his own Blue Origin spacecraft during the first manned mission later this month.
And I know you think that this is a great thing.
How does NASA think about itself in the context of private-sector investment in space exploration and its own role?

More power to these space billionaires.
Now, they’re not going into orbit.
They’re just going on an 11- or 15-minute ride to the edge of space, have about three minutes of zero G, and then come back.
You will start to have private astronauts early next year start going into orbit around the Earth.
And we will have private astronauts that will come under the tutelage of a professional former astronaut that will visit the space station.
So there’s a whole new explosion of new kind of uses of space in the private sector.

SpaceX rockets built by Elon Musk have already been used to power NASA missions.
And SpaceX is designing a lunar lander that is intended to take humans back to the Moon.
You know, there are some who argue that NASA should stay out of the business of building rockets and that this should be left to the private sector.
There is a view that NASA’s role in space exploration should be to set the vision for the country and then partner with the private sector who can do a better job of controlling costs and meeting deadlines.
What’s your response to that?

Well, that was the whole theory of the space bill, the NASA bill of 2010, was to have the best of both worlds.
Now, always, NASA has depended on the commercial sector.
All of our previous flights to the Moon, for example, were all done with private companies, with NASA overseeing them.
In effect, you’re having a version of that right now as we’re going back to the Moon with the first woman and the first person of color.

Let me ask you — because China and Russia have announced that they have plans to launch a spacecraft as soon as October to look for ice on the Moon, and they say that they are going to also build a permanent research base at the South Pole of the Moon by 2030, it begs the question of are we entering an age of a new space race, Senator?

Personally, I think we are, because I think the Chinese have a very aggressive space program.
Just within the last six months, they’ve landed on Mars.
They’re only the second nation to have landed on Mars.
Now, we’ve been on the surface of Mars since the 1970s, but they’re the second.
Look what they’ve done just a few weeks ago.
They now launched a space station, and now they have it occupied with their taikonauts.
And this announcement that they’re partnering with Russia, that should give us pause, as well, because Russia has been our partner when they were the Soviet Union in 1975 when we had Apollo-Soyuz.
And they have built the International Space Station with us.
And my opinion is that they will continue to be our partner on the International Space Station.
But we’ve got to watch a new space race with the Chinese government.

Is a space race good for innovation and exploration?

Competition is always good.

The critics would say even with Russia and China teaming up, they really don’t present enough of an existential threat for us to focus as uniquely and singularly as we did on the space race in the ’60s and ’70s.

Well, it depends on how you want to measure that.
Do you want, for example, for China, to have them land all of these missions that they’re planning on the South Pole, which is the place where there should be a lot of ice, and, therefore, you have fuel and you have oxygen?
They say it’s an international scientific mission.
Well, what happens if they suddenly get there, and we’re not there, and they say, ‘No, it’s an exclusive economic zone.
You can’t come in’? So you always want to be prepared?
I don’t think the United States wants to be second on anything.
And I think that’s why you’re seeing the vigorous support of the Biden administration with our space program.

One ‘gee whiz’ moment on the horizon is the launch of the new space telescope that is being advertised as being able to look much closer at the beginning of time.
This is the James Webb Telescope.
What does NASA hope it might find, Senator?

It’s going to look back in time to the beginning of the development of the universe.
As a result, we’re going to find out more about the development.
In finding out about that, we’re going to find out how did all of these solar systems occur in all of these millions and millions of galaxies.
And so we’re going to be able to determine what happened that we are so fortunate on planet Earth that we had a habitable atmosphere that will sustain life.
And by the way, the more and more that we find out about that, we can be better stewards of our own planet and protect the life we have here on this planet.

One final question.
Given what we know about the UAPs, when is the right time, Senator, for us to come up with a plan to handle intelligent life that we’re looking for?

Well, we better identify it first.
And once we identify it, then we’ll know what to do.
We don’t have any idea if suddenly an alien is going to appear.
This is still great speculation.
But we’re in the search for life out there, and this phenomenon that these Navy pilots have seen, let’s find out about it.
What is it?
And then we can deal with it.

For all the contingency plans that the U.S. government has on every shelf, in every binder, I would think that we would be more prepared for that possible eventuality than you say that we are.

It is what it is.

Senator Nelson, thank you very much for joining me on ‘Firing Line’ to talk about space and NASA under your leadership.

It’s my pleasure.
Thank you.

‘Firing Line with Margaret Hoover’ is made possible in part by… And by… Corporate funding is provided by…
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https://www.tpr.org/science-technology/2021-06-18/physicist-takes-a-serious-look-at-unidentified-aerial-phenomena?fbclid=IwAR1fW03fnmXWx8YxT19JMrMR3TuTlZLDLymoAsC98YLnAO6KvVZwWsbYGPM

Physicist Takes A Serious Look At Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

Courtesy Department of Defense

Screen capture from the 'Gimbal Video' taken aboard a Navy fighter jet from the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt near the Florida coast in 2015.

In case you may have missed it, a big news story has been bubbling to the surface. The U.S. Navy confirmed that earlier leaked videos did, in fact, show what they call UAP's or unidentified aerial phenomena. The Pentagon has admitted they've been studying them and recently NASA has announced its own investigation. So it seems as if the government is concerned about the national security threat these phenomena may pose.

Academia has been slow to take up the subject, possibly for fear of ridicule, but even that is changing. Professor Kevin Knuth is an associate professor of physics at the University in Albany. Among other things, he is a former NASA research scientist at the Ames Research Center.

Knuth authored a paper titled Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles. It included case studies from 1951 to present day, which included sightings of objects near the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier in 2004.

All the reports consist of reliable eyewitness testimony and, more importantly, corroborating radar data. In the Nimitz case, objects were tracked on radar several times, descending from 28,000 feet, which is about five miles up, down to sea level in about 8.7 seconds. How fast is that? Knuth did the math.

"So those accelerations we estimated were on the order of about 5000 G's, which is 5,000 times the acceleration of gravity, which is really crazy. Our fighter jets can really only handle about 13 G's before the wings get ripped off," he said.

At midpoint on the way down, the craft would have been traveling at approximately 35,000 miles per hour through the air and without a sonic boom. Knuth says he's disappointed there has not been more serious study done by scientists.

"For me, it's a little disconcerting." he said. "We've had 70 years, three quarters of a century where we've had these things flying in our airspace. They show up in military bases. They show up over nuclear weapons sites, and virtually nothing is known about them. And I look at this as probably, I think, eventually when we finally learn what these things are — this is going to be one of the greatest intelligence failures in history," said Knuth.

What does Knuth believe is the most likely explanation of these UAP's? He says it might be reasonable to assume they're built by a government or an aerospace company,"...except for a few important points," he said. "One is the accelerations are really anomalous to the point where it's really not clear how the physics would work in that case. So whoever has been making these things would have had to do not just have one technological leapfrog, but it would be multiple technological leapfrogs. And that would be quite surprising."

He added: "And it would be surprising to have a company or a nation who has this technology but doesn't use it. And more importantly, these things have been observed before. People have been able to fly."

There are skeptics. Some say these sightings are actually low tech drones or even balloons launched by adversaries that are fooling the observers. It's clear, though, that the government is concerned. The director of national intelligence has been directed by the Senate Intelligence Committee to work with the Defense Department to produce a report on UAP sightings by June 25.

Knuth said of the upcoming report, "I expect that there probably will be a public component to the report and the classified component to the report, and the public component will probably leave things a bit up in the air, whereas I would hope that the classified version would actually have more information."

Knuth says if the report hints at anything other than worldly technology, information will be slow to be released.

"Some of this might be a little too shocking for us to handle all at once, so they might instead try to ease us into it a bit." he said.